GETECH Group (LSE:GTC) — Interim Results for the six months to 30 June 2026

0:00 Good afternoon, and welcome to the GETECH GROUP PLC investor presentation. Throughout this recorded presentation, investors will be in listen only mode. Questions are encouraged and could be submitted at any time via the q and a tab situated on the right hand corner of your screen. Please simply type in your questions and press send. Before we begin, I would like to submit the following poll. And I'll hand you over to Chris Jepp, CEO. Good good afternoon, sir. Hi there. Thanks for the introduction, and thanks everyone for joining. So today, I'm gonna be walking you through GETECH's twenty twenty six h one results presentation, and, I'm joined by my colleague, Simon Brown. With, along with Simon, Max Brower is our chief business development officer. We're a new, relatively new management team. We've been in place since January 2025, and, you know, we've been executing on a plan to really turn around GETECH's fortunes, and, you know, we feel the company's in a much, much better place now than it was previously.

0:59 And, you know, we're really proud of the work we've done and sort of quietly confident going ahead as well. So I'm gonna walk you through where we've got to and look at what's lying ahead of us as well. So for those of you that don't know GETECH, really, we're the subsurface experts. We, we're a long standing, well trusted brand, been going, been listed twenty one years, been going, three decades or more. We work globally, and we've got a fantastic, client base of both household names and sort of names you've all heard of, and as well as a long tail of sort of less well known energy and natural resource companies. And what we do for those guys is we we help them reduce their exploration risks, with our products and our insights.

1:51 And many of those companies have been with GETECH a long time, many of them using our sort of key, platforms of GLOBE, which is our geoscience knowledge platform, and our gravity and magnetic data, which is where the company started. And we're very much a products company. We're underpinned by a fair chunk of ARR. And, you know, last year, 2025, about nearly 80% of our revenues came from products. So, where we got to so far in 2026, halfway through the year? So last year, for those of you who don't know the story, was a bit of a sort of resetting of the fundamentals of the business, and this year has all been about building on trading momentum. So given the, lower operational cost base that we developed last year, we're now really delivering on, revenue growth, returning to profitability.

2:45 And kind of key metrics of revenues, EBITDA, cash generation, they're all up, moving in the right direction. Got a bit more detail on that on a later slide. And, you know, this is driven by great sort of background trading, business as usual trading, and also some major contract wins. Early this year, we announced a renewal of one of our Globe major companies, and that had about a 28 value uplift to the contract. It's one of the key ways that we try and grow ARR. We also, post period added a new GLOBE client, we were very happy about. First one for a few years, really showing the strength of our revitalized sales team. That was a European super major. And then a few days after that, we were able to announce one of the largest contracts we've ever won, this time in this in the natural hydrogen space, which is area we've been focusing on in order to diversify our revenue somewhat as well. And that was with the European Commission.

3:41 Bit more detail on that later, but a significant contract of over €1,000,000. So, you know, looking forward, we're starting to see positive market signs for the first time in quite a few years in, the sort of upstream, energy world, and that's really being driven by kind of low reserve replacement rates among oil and gas majors and also sort of geopolitical uncertainty and sort of security of supply concerns. And that's, you know, really had a good effect on our trading. It's also had a good effect on our new business pipeline. We're very much on track to meet our guidance for this year, for 2026. And along the way, we've picked up a new major shareholder in Excalibur. Again, more on that, shortly.

4:30 So for those of you that don't know too much about GETECH, the main markets we serve are the energy and natural resources markets, and in particular, oil and gas, minerals, natural hydrogen, and to some extent, geothermal. Oil and gas, as I've said, exploration is very much back in focus. There was a announcement by the CEO of TGS, earlier this week that they fully expect exploration budgets to to be larger next year. We're still kind of working on budgets that were set in 2025 before the sort of recent shocks to the energy system, and and that's all, you know, great industry and sector tailwinds for us. Likewise, there's increasing recognition of the need for more exploration for key metals such as copper, lithium, and gold remains important as well. Natural hydrogen, hydrogen that's found underground rather than, you know, created by electrolyzers.

5:28 That's kind of a a nascent and emerging sector. Helium, there are a lot of shortages for, and hydrogen natural hydrogen and helium are often found collocated together. So that's a market we've been winning work in. And, again, referring back to the previous slide, we've won this very large contract and and more on that later. You know, we we are in energy transition. There's been slower progress in some some parts of that, especially with sort of oil and gas exploration coming back into play. But we're seeing a bit of a shift in demand. Things like data centers are really driving demand across all options for energy provision, including geothermal. So, yeah, we can continue to keep our eye on on on that area too. But a lot of what we do is oil and gas. That's very much swinging back into fashion with an eye on all these other sectors as well.

6:19 So I'll hand over to Simon to talk through the numbers from our h one twenty twenty six. Great. Thanks, Chris. Yeah. Just building on a a few of the points you you've raised there regarding metrics. We announced revenue growth of 15% compared to h one twenty five. That's driven by a combination of those new business wins, but also strong customer retention in that period. The revenue growth is now translating into profitability, and the group delivered positive first half adjusted EBITDA of $200,000 compared to a $100,000 loss in the previous period. Importantly, the cost base being stabilized, we're also seeing that progress converting into cash.

7:10 So we see that continuing now as we move into H2. ARR was broadly stable flat on the year end position, but in the post periods we've seen that increase to just over 3,000,000 with those key new contract wins and the strong customer retention that we've seen as well. And then finally on to order book, it stood at 4,000,000 at the end of the period. In the two months post period, we've increased that to 4,700,000. So that gives us great visibility and confidence as we move into h two. 1,600,000 of that is expected to be recognized in H2 and a further circa 2,000,000 will be recognized in '27.

8:02 So in summary, think the financial indicators are all moving in the right direction, giving us confidence as we we move into the remainder of 2026. Back to you, Chris. Thanks, Simon. I think worth noting as well at this point that GETECH has historically been a h two weighted company in terms of revenue. We're often about 60% revenues in h two. So, you know, we we really feel that we're, well placed as we go through the year. So just think now looking further ahead if you like, and looking at strategy, you know, we, the new management team has really focused, the company back on our key strengths, looking at the subsurface, and things related to extracting, things from the subsurface.

8:48 We prioritize the sectors I've already gone through. And what we do for those sectors is we leverage our geoscience, geophysics understanding, and our products like GLOBE and our GIS software products, as well as new technologies such as AI and machine learning to provide unique solutions and insight for our clients. And we have a lot of intellectual property in the company, particularly Globe, which has been built, over fifteen years. Gravity and magnetic data, as we call it, G and M data, that's been being built by the company since it started as a spin out from Leeds University, and the software, products have been developed over twenty years as well. And our ambition really is to be the world's most trusted source of subsurface and geospatial insight, you know, for our clients in the sectors in which we work.

9:34 And, you know, we feel that that will get us to being sustainably cash generative. We have a real target to grow our ARR up towards the level of the cost base and potentially beyond. And we do both of those things by keeping our products relevant, enhancing them, evolving them, and by keeping an eye on diversification, as well. So at a high level, that's our strategy. Last year was about a turnaround. This year is about momentum. And as we execute on the plan, we'll be getting more into a growth phase. Globe is our key product, really, and it's one thing that that GETECH has been built around over the last fifteen years. And, you know, this product is trusted by five of the six, world's oil and gas super majors.

10:22 It was actually built on our on our own datasets, on our own gravity and magnetic database, which is a global dataset, and itself one of the world's most extensive commercial, commercially available datasets. You know, it's fantastic to be able to tell the rest of our market, which by the way is very large as well. You know, five of the six super majors are only a part of the oil and gas market. There's a very long tail of, large independent, as well as national oil and gas, companies and governments, that are customers for our offerings. And it's great to be able to show them this kind of the the peak of the industry, if you like, these super majors rely on GETECH GLOBE technology. As I say, it was built over fifteen years of, investment, by highly skilled geoscientists, geophysicists, again, using our database as its foundation, so not easily, recreatable process from that point of view. And GLOBE can be applied across multiple kind of exploration scenarios.

11:19 Some of the technical things are shown on the screen there, but also used across multiple, sectors. So it was built for oil and gas, but the model can also be used for mining use cases, GFL, natural hydrogen, and so on. You know, we think that the scale of the dataset and the the the amount of historical investment and the proprietary nature of a lot of the inputs, and the work we've done during that time make the dataset, exceptionally difficult to recreate. One of the, inputs into our response for European Commission natural hydrogen tender was to use our own GLOBE data and our own gravity and magnetic data. So this is a great example of how we can use our IP to win new business.

12:05 And as part of the consortium, we were selected by the European Commission to conduct a geologic Europe wide geological assessment of the natural hydrogen potential, across the continent. And we beat off competition from a number of blue chip organizations, many of them household names. So, you know, we're super proud of that. This is a a chunky contract worth over a million euros. It's a twelve month project, so we'll recognize it this year and next. Obviously, that strengthens our order book as Simon's already demonstrated and gives us good visibility on services revenues, you know, into next year. I think of it as, like, a really strategically significant win. We have done a lot of work, smaller projects in natural hydrogen, and this this big project really validates our approach, the investment we've made in the sector, and it also positions us right at the forefront of the natural hydrogen world, and it it could potentially give us a a platform for similar wins as other areas look to do similar projects.

13:06 Not everyone's mapped, you know, the the potential for their natural hydrogen, in fact, very few places have. So, really, the rest of the world to go after in this kind of play outside of, say, The US, which have done one, and Europe, are doing one. And, obviously, natural hydrogen's important for energy transition. It's clean. There's a lot of it. You know, estimates put it up at a similar magnitude to oil and gas and potentially beyond. Obviously, it's important for transition, could potentially, support energy sovereignty, obviously works towards decarbonization. With the sort of turnaround of the company, we've, been able to attract a new shareholder. Excalibur Multiphysics Group acquired a 25 and a half percent shareholding through the summer post period.

13:58 If you don't know Excalibur, they're a global leader in airborne geophysical acquisition. So they shoot the kind of data that that we hold already, gravity and magnetics and and and other types of data, electromagnetic, for example. And they're also moving into country mapping. They have operations across six continents. They have a specialist aircraft fleet for doing this kind of acquisition. So you can see there's there's quite a bit of potential interest there in terms of us doing similar things. And as you'd expect, we're exploring opportunities for how we can collaborate going forward. Talked a little bit about ARR. How do we intend to grow our ARR? It's a key strategic priority for the business. Anything we can win that's ARR means we don't have to win it again next year, obviously, especially if it's a multiyear agreement.

14:49 So there's two two main ways for us to grow ARR. First one is to land new clients, and the second one is to leverage our existing very strong customer base as you've seen from the logos that you've seen. So there is a large market for us to go after. We we might have nailed the super major or most of the super majors, but there are some very large independent oil and gas companies down to very small oil and gas companies that could benefit from the solutions that we offer. Most independents and super majors look after about a third of oil and gas across the world. National governments and NOCs look after the the other two thirds. So there's a large market of governments to go after, all around the world. And, you know, we I'm looking to leverage our strong customer base as well, and we saw some evidence of that via the renewal of one of our GLOBE clients earlier in the year with a contract uplift of about 28%, driven by, our other product enhancements, and bundling in, other offerings.

15:57 So talking of product enhancements, these are some of the things that have been on our, optics this year. GLOBE, we're always, looking to, enhance with new analytics, but also new, content, new data layers, and new delivery options as technology evolves around us. Obviously, integration of AI and machine learning capabilities to really extract the maximum value from the data within the system. Similarly, our gravity and magnetic data holdings, always looking to source new datasets, merge them in, and, create new commercial opportunities. We're also looking at new ways to distribute that data, moving hopefully from sort of spot sale, one off commercial transactions to a more recurring ARR model.

16:43 Our unconventionals analyst product was up, revenue wise about 22% year on year. So we continue to push the boundaries with that to attract new clients, and that's all about building ARR, with enhanced analytics within that product. And I've mentioned AI and machine learning a few times. You know, we look at that, of course, as everyone is in terms of making ourselves more efficient, integrating capabilities across our offerings, and also being aware of kind of the moats to the the moats around us in in defense of the the threats to the threats of AI. So we put a lot of work in in into AI this year, and we expect that to follow through, into our offerings down the line. So our core markets remain the priority going forward, but we do like to keep an eye diversification opportunities for reasons I've already mentioned.

17:38 Within oil and gas, we tend to be quite upstream, but there are other areas of oil and gas which are revenue opportunities to us, specifically appraisal and into development. In fact, our unconventionals analyst product is an example of that, which is a bit further downstream from from exploration. So we have good skills there, and we're starting to win, services work in that area. We have a lot of geospatial or GIS expertise within the company. The gist market itself is very large, and we're well well placed to grow our own revenues within that market. And this year, we've been working on new offerings to launch during the year and and going forward. And there's clear revenue upside potential, we believe, for GETECH there. Then on the low carbon side, we have a strong presence in the geothermal market. We continue to pick up projects there, and we've, you know, had that great validation of our natural hydrogen work with the European Commission study.

18:36 So there are areas we continue to progress. We do have a sound energy JV with, for natural hydrogen exploration in Morocco, and we continue to progress that, slowly in a capital light fashion. Generally, we continue to focus on our core markets and the best kind of, revenue opportunities in those. So in summary, you know, 2025 was a bit of a turnaround year for GETECH. We've continued the strong trading momentum at the end of twenty twenty five into the first half of this year, and we can see from the post period wins that that's carrying on into into the, h two. Those contract wins have allowed us to increase order book and ARR. We continue to focus the business on ARR growth, and, you know, we're continuing to maintain our cost, cost based discipline. And and, actually, we're we're kind of we're kind of highly leveraged to growth with, you know, any additional product and data sales really do hit straight down to the bottom line for us now with that relatively fixed cost base that we have.

19:43 We are seeing exploration activity starting to increase. We're very optimistic that budgets will increase for next year, twenty twenty seven, across the industry for exploration activity. And, you know, that that puts GETECH in in a really good place with some market tailwinds behind us for the first time, in a long time. And, you know, as such, as a board, we're we're very confident of meeting our market expectations for this year. So we look forward to, the rest of the year, and, obviously, we'll update as we get through the year and into into 2027. And with that, I would like to thank you for your attention and jump over to any questions. That's great, guys. Thank you for updating investors today. Can I please remind investors to submit your questions just by using the q and a tab situated on the right hand corner of your screen? And for your reference, a recording of today's presentation will be available in the Investor Meet company platform shortly after the meeting has ended. Guys, as you can see, we have received a number of questions during today's presentation. Chris, if I could just hand back to you now to read out the questions and give responses to the appropriate producer, and I'll pick up from you at the end.

20:52 Yes. Will do. Let's just see if I can group a few of these questions together. So there's one here. Is there more growth possible from the five super majors that you're dealing with? Absolutely. Yeah. As we've seen from the renewal we did with the state backed GLOBE client where we uplifted contract value, clearly, that's, you know, a a tactic we can bring into play with our all our other existing GLOBE clients, those super majors included. So, yeah, that's very much, yes. We can do that, and it's a sales strategy as we approach renewal for those contracts that that we're that we're very much working on.

21:47 Sorry. I'm trying to just move through the questions. Are you seeing customers increasingly commit to longer duration contracts, and has the average contract length changed meaningfully over the last twelve to eighteen months? I think it depends on the product. Most of our GLOBE contracts are three years, and that's that suits us. It suits some of our clients as well. Some of them are in discussion about extending that up to five years just to get a better view on costs and, you know, maybe to sort of for their financial planning. So I would say it's not really a trend, but it does happen.

22:36 Has the average contract length changed meaningfully over the last twelve months? I would say no. It's probably about the same, would would be my guess from what I've seen. Could Excalibur buy GETECH? I think, probably the best thing to say here is, you know, we can't comment on what their intentions are. Clearly, they've taken a significant shareholding, and as a significant shareholder, you know, we're we're we're keen to get their thoughts. You know, we're kind of at the start of that process, and, we'll update, as things go along. There's another question on Excalibur, which I think I just answered, as much as I can.

23:29 Can you talk us through the pipeline for new GLOBE clients? We have a a good pipeline. I'm not gonna give specifics on it. We don't put those numbers in the public domain. But, you know, that pipeline has opportunities with all the, types of companies that I've discussed today, and we continue to work through it. I think one thing we would say sort of qualitatively about our pipeline is it's improving both in terms of its size and also in terms of the size of individual deals within it, which gives us great encouragement. Once a customer adopts Globe, how successful are you at selling other products into the same account?

24:17 Again, I think it depends on the customer. You know, once once a customer is, engaged with Globe and and using it, obviously, it gives us a lot of touch points. And, obviously, naturally, that that flows through into recognizing new requirements from the customer and being able to respond to them or not as the case may be. So how successful are we? I would say moderately successful. I think our account management could probably you know, it can always be improved. You never say never that you can't get better, but it's certainly something we keep in mind. You sound very confident of beating this year's expectations. Is that right?

25:02 I would say, we're very confident of meeting this year's market guidance as we enter h two, as I think I said during the presentation, we do tend to be h two weighted sixty forty, and q four is very important to us as companies often look to spend any surplus budget at the end of the year to get ahead into, for their next year. So, yeah, with with some good industry tailwinds, and our sort of busiest half and quarters ahead of us, we remain quietly confident, I'd say. How do you envisage growing the company out personnel wise? We have a pretty fixed cost base. We have refocused the company, so it's doing less things. It's less spread on, perhaps things that were distracting before.

25:55 So, you know, we're quite happy that we can service the the products we have and our usual level of, services work from our existing cost base. That doesn't mean that we don't get, you know, large pieces of work in that we might not need additional help, but often that help is short term, and we we have been doing that. We've been bringing in short term resources without adding permanently to the cost base. So we don't you know, we're not looking to double the size of the staff pool or or anything drastic like that, but we'll obviously respond to how busy we get and, make sure we're doing it within the scale of the revenues, and the commercial opportunity. Can you give a concrete example of how you're using AI to improve efficiency?

26:46 I'm not gonna say too much about what we do with AI sort of from a commercial point of view, but we have, you know, given our entire team access to AI tools. We are looking at providing training for those who want it or haven't already had it. You know, so just getting everyone skilled up using AI, being more efficient, that's all part of what we're doing, what you'd expect us to do in house. In terms of the etcetera bit of that question, we're also looking at a lot of, novel kind of AI approaches to add into our products like Globe, and also looking at ways that we can extract more value out of a lot of the, you know, the large amounts of data we have, both structured and unstructured in house through our products.

27:41 Thanks for the presentation. My pleasure. Thanks for joining us. And there are a couple of questions on on High Moroc, which I have to say I don't have the latest status to hand, but if you'd like to follow-up with, with us, we we can do that after after the session. One last question has just dropped in. Is your data of interest to AI companies? I think AI companies tend to be data hungry, so any novel data they can get their hands on, I think, is always of interest. And we have had discussions over the years, probably over the last five years, maybe more with, you know, some AI companies, about whether they can get access to data.

28:32 I think probably less so the case in the last couple of years, but certainly in those days when you told an AI company that, you know, that you didn't you weren't able to give them the data for free, they, they got offended and and then backed off, which is kind of amusing. But, I think a lot of those companies are used to just scraping the Internet, you know, and we've seen lots of news stories about that. So, yeah, I'm sure our data is of interest to AI companies, whether they're prepared to pay for it or or whether we give it to them, obviously is a is another question or sell it to them, obviously. So hopefully that answers that one. And unless there's any other questions, I think that might be all of them. Perfect. Thank you, sir, for answering those questions from investors today. Before we ask investors to share their feedback, which I know is particularly important to the company, Chris, could I please just ask you for some closing comments?

29:24 Sure. Well, first of all, thanks everyone for joining us. Hopefully, we've been able to show today that, you know, GETECH has, really turned the corner. All the financial metrics are moving in the right direction. We're starting to win sort of chunkier contracts. We've got a expanding pipeline, a revitalized sales team, and, you know, some, sector tailwinds behind us as well. And, you know, as we get into our busiest period of the year, you know, we're sort of quietly confident that we can continue our our momentum, and into next year as well with, hopefully, expanded exploration budgets from from our key customers and people who are most, suited to using our offerings. So, yeah, I think it's a very good time to be in GETECH's position, at the moment.

30:15 That's great. Thank you, sir. Could I please ask investors not to close this session? It should now be automatically redirected to provide your feedback. On behalf of the management team of GETECH GROUP PLC, we would like to thank you for attending today's presentation, and good afternoon.